Constraint oriented neighbourhoods - a new optimisation strategy for the unit commitment problem

Abstract

In recent years, metaheuristics have been applied with relative success to the Unit Commitment problem and methods like Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithms can be found in several papers, presenting results that are sufficiently interesting to justify further research in the area. In this paper we propose a new search strategy to solve the problem, Constraint Oriented Neighbourhoods. This strategy has been tested in a set of case studies leading to very good results, and reducing drastically the computation times.